News

Lessons Learned from Institutions Undertaking Program Prioritization

At Academic Impressions, we recently offered a national snapshot of efforts to prioritize academic programs and administrative services at higher-ed institutions. Our report included commentary from Bob Dickeson (who literally wrote the book on program prioritization) and Larry Goldstein (president of Campus Strategies, LLC), in which these two experts identified the prerequisites for success. The […]

Special Edition: Engaging Your Alumni

Are your alumni engaged? Are you sure? According to a national survey conducted by the Collaborative Innovation Network for Engagement and Giving, only 52 percent of alumni at the 100 institutions with the highest alumni participation rates believe that their alma mater keeps them closely connected and values its alumni relationships. That’s a foreboding statistic. […]

Alumni Relations ROI: An Approach

Marquette University has piloted (and refined) an innovative metrics tool for measuring the impact of alumni engagement efforts. Numerical scores are assigned to specific activities that are indicative of alumni engagement and participation, and the scoring is used to measure the return on investment for alumni relations efforts in quantitative terms and to inform allocation […]

Addressing Student Mental Health Issues – On a Budget

by Anne E. Lundquist I was very interested in the article by Kristen Domonell that appeared in University Business on March 19.  In this article, she emphasized that, in an era of increasing numbers of students with significant psychological disabilities and serious mental issues, colleges and universities are being forced to “do more with less” […]

Meeting the Challenge of Program Prioritization

Report: May 2015. In this report, you’ll see a national snapshot of program prioritization efforts based on a recent survey of over 100 institutional leaders — plus critical lessons learned to aid you in your own efforts, including: Read the report. See Other Topics in Institutional & Academic Planning

Naming Opportunities: Don’t Miss Them

Those shops that are best able to leverage naming opportunities to secure gifts and to steward long-term relationships with donors will be those that have thought ahead. Even as more institutions look to launch new campaigns — often increasingly ambitious ones in terms of their dollar goals — donors are increasingly interested in attaching their […]

Are Outdated Policies Holding You Back?

“Your company’s organizational memory might be holding it back,” business professor Vijay Govindarajan and retired management consultant Srikanth Srinivas cautioned in Harvard Business Review this week, offering advice that spans the for-profit and non-profit sectors. According to Govindarajan and Srinivas, Organizational memory – the way we have always done things – can include “obsolete policies […]

A Fresh Look at the Developmental Ed Curriculum

Institutions that have made real strides in improving retention and academic success rates for academically underprepared students have focused not only on revisiting their policies around academic placement but also on revamping their developmental education curriculum. Let’s take a close look at two successful—though quite different—models: The Assisted Learning Approach Dispensing with the traditional developmental sequence […]

Why Rethinking Developmental Education is a Priority

Included in This Report: A Letter from Amit Mrig, President, Academic Impressions March 2013. Given public and federal pressures on college completion, several higher education and policy groups have recently shone the spotlight on developmental education. Recent studies suggest that half of all undergraduates will take at least one remedial course, but that only a small […]

Placing Students in Gateway Courses: A More Informed Approach

One of the most insidious, documented effects of the traditional pipeline of developmental courses on an incoming student is the fatigue of taking multiple non-credit courses (or, in some cases, being required to retake a non-credit course repeatedly). Tristan Denley, provost at Austin Peay State University, calls this course sequence the “slow death.” Your goal […]